India's Mistral seeks funding by year end

BANGALORE, India  Mistral Software, an eight-year old Indian embedded software and hardware development firm, will decide either a merger, acquisition or infusion of venture funds by the year-end.

"We have selected one or two small firms in India which we may acquire, and for which we may need some funds. We are also considering raising up to $10 million in venture funds and we plan to do some or all of these before December this year," said Anees Ahmed, president, Mistral Software Pvt. Ltd.

The aim is to quickly ramp up to the next level and get into new service offerings, such as ASIC design, which the company says is not possible at the moment, given EDA tool suite costs. Mistral has its own year-long training routine for new hires, and at any given time its 260-person staff works on between 5 to 10 reference designs, he said.

The $12 million Mistral needs to at least double its revenues to be of some reasonable size and capitalize on its IP and customer base acquired so far. It released the Rapid Development Kit (RDK) for Texas Instrument’s OMAP5912 starter kit in June to speed up product and application development for PDAs, voice and video over IP, and mobile phones and is now working on a variant for GPS-based navigation applications.

Mistral has designed FPGAs with up to 8 million gates, so it is logical to get into ASIC designs, Ahmed said. The thinking is that this could be taken up once the company obtains the required funds and the quicker this is done, the higher the company’s valuations will be.

High-end work such as developing a 12-processor DSP board has been done by Mistral, but the company needs to grow to the right size to fully leverage skills it has shown in the past, he added.